i have an msi p4nsli mother board and i just switched over from a 3.8ghz p4 to an intel confidential pentium d 3.2 engineering sample cpu.i re-set up windows and on first boot,chkdisk started and said that my secondary disk,my storage drive that i have been using for some time,had a corrupt master file table.this drive has almost 400 gigs of data on it and has never failed me.it is only about 6 months old.it is a little slow for a sata 2 drive,but whatever.nothing was changed at first.but i figured maybe it was the cable.no.then i double checked the power cable,no.i then decided to put the drive in my secondary box and hopefully just pull data through the network.no go.other machine says the same thing.i put the drive on yet a third machine and it says the same thing.this drive has always been a secondary drive and only used for storage.it has about 4 years of data on it.and i fix computers for a living.so i have always accumilated iso's,drivers and lots of little apps.not to mention all kinds of photos and music.many of which will be impossible to replace.i have thought about doing a data recovery on the drive,but i know that the drive has not really been damaged.
anyone have any decent ideas?i cant really afford to loose this data.and i know....i should have done a double back up of my data to dvd's or yet another disk,but this shouldn't have happened when all other hardware is perfect and i know the disk is still functional.

ok so what is the solution?i am scanning drive now.will this program allow me to adjust the master file table to recover the partition?or will it do it itself?because all i see,is it will make an image of the drive.
the problem here is that i dont have another drive the same size to extract the image to.

program scans then tells me there are no visible partitions.i ran a data recovery program and it saw some half a million files of various types.then locked the machine up.i'm guessing due to the fact it has no where to store that much of an image.

You are going to need a good partition recovery program to preform a partition recovery. This should be your first step. After your partition is recovered check to see if you can see all your files. After if you still have files missing you can use a program like WinHex to recover these files or even other type of file recovery programs. Be careful which one you do choose to use in this step If you are not sure don't do any more damage to your disk trying to find this. I had a person who tried to recover his disk and lost all that was on it and it is now empty because he choose the wrong command and it appears he has done a low level format on his drive. Be careful and seek professional advice if the data on this drive is important to you.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Here is a good tip for you for further work. I too have been in computers for over 35 years. When I do an upgrade to a system with a slave drive or install a new system that has a slave drive I never attach the drive during installation. I ran into this problem a long time ago doing so. If the drive has a partition inside of it and it is the master drive then I leave it on the computer. But I hook up the drive and after installing and booting windows for the first time I then turn off the computer and attach the slave drive to the system. I am not sure excatally why this happens but for some reason there is something in the new material and the new installation of windows that can effect a slave drive. I see this happen here a lot due to the same thing that you did. They hook up the complete system with a new hard drive to install the OS on and leave the slave drive attached to the MB. More than once I have had a drive here that has come to me with the same problem you are having now. So for me to avoid this problem I only hook up the drive but never attach the IDE an power cable to it until I am finished installing windows and the drivers for the MB. Then I power off the system and attach the IDE and power cable to avoid loosing the MBR of the slave drive.

If your files are still on the drive you can purchase WinHex and do a raw recovery of these files if a partition recovery software does not recover your lost partition.

If you have never used this before maybe find an expert near you and give your drive to him to recover. Be careful becasue you can over write your drive very easlily and then recovery will be impossible. Seek professional help if your data is important to you. If it is only logial damage to the drive by what you are explaining and not physical damage then your repair cost for recovery will not be so expensive to do this work. But if you make a mistake then your repair cost will triple to try and recovery your data from your drive.

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Iorana Haraharaini

as i thought,it is a windows thing.i was looking around the microsoft site as a last ditch effort just before i was going to use microscope to flatten the drive low-level style,and start all over,and what do you know,i found out that it is the main file table for the NTFS file system.it is basically the table of contents file for the volume.as it grows and shrinks,it sometimes gets stuck on a big word or something.anyway microsoft has a hotfix that you have to REQUEST,wtf.so i did.and it did nothing but run boot and come back with the same error.........more research..........maybe one of us can fix thier problems.you'd think that when they release new hardware/software they'd at least talk to one another before doing it so that maybe all the parts would understand what the software was saying.........more research.
i guess it might be a little bit my fault as i have always practiced disconnecting all drives before setting up only the OS drive.but i was so jazzed about upgrading to a dual core finally(from a 3.8 single core to a 3.2 dual core,doesnt make sense huh)that i figured it wouldnt be a problem.
there is a solution and i will find it.
any input will be helpfull

Get WinHex and when using check the boot NTSF inside and see what file you are looking for normally it is the one with has a large name or bad characters in this field. May time when you name a file that exceeds 20 to 30 characters this can cause this problem. You should try and keep you file system naming down and not have long names associated with documents and files to try and avoid this problem. I think that maybe in WinHex you can try and search the MBR records and see where it is hanging. This can give you an idea of why your drive has done this. Windows OS when installed on your master drive has put a file into the slave drive so that it can be recognized by the OS when booting. It has not over written you MBR on your slave drive it has only added - let me see how do call it - not sure in English - but this record is used by the new OS to attach the slave drive inside the software so that it can be used and recognized by the new OS that you have installed and will work correctly with all the new material. If this drive did not have any data on it before installing as a slave drive it would not make a difference to you. You can go into the Adminstrative options and configure and partition and format the drive from there. That is what the new OS does to this drive. It has treated your drive like a virgin drive and has added this option to your MBR file. Considering this drive has data on it and you have partitioned the drive and stored records and files on the drive this is what is causing you the problem now. In WinHex find where your partition signature is and look closely at this file. You can use another drive to compare this file with. You should be able to find your problem right there. If you are good in Hex and can rewrite this section that should correct your problems. Software fixes from Microsoft will not correct this problem at all. You have to manually correct it and take off the records that were added by the new OS in order to get the drive back to the status it was in before installing the new OS.

WARNING: This is not an easy task and should not be tried. You can make more of a mess of all this than just letting someone near you do it for you. A problem like this should not be that expensive for an expert to preform for you. He understand the HEX codes and what to look for and how to repair this problem. He normally sees a problem similar to this many times over in his work and knows right where to go and what to look for and the correct codes to use to modify this records and eleminate the problem you are having. Before you install nay more hot fixes and things like this to the drive and rewite this record again and again you should try and find someone to help you out with this.

OTHER OPTION: Put the drive back in the system as a slave go to Admin options, make ready your drive, delete partition info on drive, start over with new partition and then format the drive. You can also preform this using a partition software. I will not recommand Partition Magic because I do not like it and have had too many problems here for people using it. I know that many people find this package great and use it but not me. Sorry...

You should just use WinHex and do a raw recovery of this drive get you info off it and start all over again. You will be spending hours if not days to rename all your data on the drive but at least you will have it.

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Iorana Haraharaini

first off,i like what i hear.i have submitted this sitituation to about 6 other forums including this one.you are the first person who has made any sense of what is going on.thank you.
i have been working on computers for about 15 years steady.i have never encountered this kind of problem before,although i saw it for what it was right off.just didnt run with it for a little bit because i wasnt completely sure if it was in the crc or if it was like i said,a windows thing.
i have already successfully recovered about 146 gigs of misc files using easy recovery.but that program is very picky about what file extension it wants to recover.and i still have about 250 gigs of disk images sitting there.things like operating systems,games,grapic suites etc. all with the ISO extension.whats even worse,is the 80 gigs of misc tools.of which i know that there are tons of things that i could be using to remedy this problem.
whats the worst part of all is my wedding is in three weeks,and all the invites templates that i made,the electronic rsvp's i've already recieved,the guest list,all the menu orders and reciepts(that i nedd to pick up the 100 lbs of filet mingion)and everything else you could possibly imagine having to do with it,were all transfered to that drive the night before this happened.
anyway i will attempt what you have suggested and hope for the best.i am quite confident and know pretty much what i am doing(i hope)
if i happen to get this all together,you can bet there will be a detailed description as how to do it when i am done.

Another option try GetDataBack for NTSF and FAT. This will also recover file system. Win Hex is better for raw recovery you can add a profile of your file signature inside winhex so that it can search for your files by type. Good luck stay away from the free software they are only going to cause you problems. You will need to purchase a software to do this one correctly if you want your data back. Sorry

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Iorana Haraharaini

Got a case just like yours in yesterday. I have a good partiton recovery software that I use and all I did was rebuild the original partition table on the drive and then used R Studio to read and retrieve the data on my drive. Worked great for me. But you will need to invest in a good partition recovery program to use in order to do this. Good luck

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Iorana Haraharaini

In my opinion a good partition recovery program to restore your original partition is the first thing to do. If you can get back your partition then you can use a number of other programs that are out there to retireve your data off your disk from. But as long as your partition table is messed up you are not going to get anywhere with all of this. You need to preform logical recovery of this and go from there. If it were me this is how I would start and have done so in many cases such as your. I recover my partition signature first and then go from there seeing what program I will use to get the data off the drive. There have been some cases where i have been really lucky on after recovering my partition signature I have been able to go into the configuration of the system and see the drive and open it up and recover the data from it. After to get out of all this I have zeroed filled the drive and done a system format on it using the new material on the system

Plus yes there is another prohlem I did over look going from a P4 3.8 to a P4 2 core processor will cause you this problem. It is in the make up of the mother board and chip sets used to recognize the hard drive. Windows will install this into all hard drives attached to these boards. Before you could get away with it more except when they changed from P3 to P4 processors then you had to be careful not to leave the drive attached to the MB when installing windows.

Good luck if you get a good partition recovery program and I think it is something like Partition Doctor I will check and PM you what I use then you have a really good chance to get this fixed.

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Iorana Haraharaini